Scientists have resolved pieces of a nearly 200-year-old evolutionary puzzle surrounding the group of mammals that Charles Darwin called the "strangest animals ever discovered." New research led by the American ...

A team of scientists from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History gained new understanding about the evolutionary history of whale hearing thanks to a rare collection of whales at the museum.

Thirteen million years ago, as many as seven different species of crocodiles hunted in the swampy waters of what is now northeastern Peru, new research shows. This hyperdiverse assemblage, revealed through ...

Tropical turtle fossils discovered in Wyoming by University of Florida scientists reveal that when the earth got warmer, prehistoric turtles headed north. But if today's turtles try the same technique to cope with warming ...

A new study about echinoids—marine animals like sea urchins and sand dollars—gives scientists a reason to rethink a classical pattern of evolution. Fossil-based studies have traditionally indicated that ...

The ecosystems of the Adriatic Sea have weathered natural climate shifts for 125,000 years, but humans could be rapidly altering this historically stable biodiversity hot spot, a University of Florida study ...

Three people died worldwide from shark attacks last year, far below the average of 6.3 deaths per year over the past decade, according to the International Shark Attack File report released by the University of Florida today.

Anyone who's ever been to France knows it's a country that celebrates its food and takes enormous pride in not only the taste, but also the appearance and the overall "joie de vivre" involved. So it should ...

The most exciting findings covering Mesozoic mammals over the last two decades have come from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods of China. Remarkably preserved fossils across nearly all major groups of Mesozoic ...

Almost all natural history museums and recognised public collections of fossils have in the past relied on finds purchased from private collectors, and many still do. But the role of amateur fossil collectors, how their finds are treated ...

Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th century Polish astronomer and mathematician, wasn't the first to suggest that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe—the idea originated with the ancient Greeks—but ...

Existing age estimates of American mastodon fossils indicate that these extinct relatives of elephants lived in the Arctic and Subarctic when the area was covered by ice caps—a chronology that is at odds ...